Concave Wall Surface Tracking for Aerial Manipulator Using Contact Force Estimation Algorithm

This paper presents a control algorithm of a contact-based inspection for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) manipulator without using a force sensor. The conventional contact-based operation methods for a ground-based manipulator require a force sensor, but the force measurement is noisy on uneven surfaces. The noisy measurement can cause an unstable flight of the UAV when using direct force measurement as an input. To resolve this issue, we design a contact-force estimation algorithm of a UAV and desired trajectory generation algorithm. Contact-force is estimated by using the dynamics of a UAV and IMU sensor. In addition, to track the concave wall safely, we propose a heading-angle alignment algorithm. Through the Gazebo simulation, we show that the proposed method is effective compared to the force-sensor-based existing method.